Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "enlightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened Europe.

The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe.

Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment.

Description

Includes bibliographical references (p. [505]-538) and index.

Table of Contents

Preface

Bibliographical Note

Pt. 1 Orientations

Introduction

William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer

1 The Enlightenment Our Contemporary

Dorinda Outram

Pt. 2 Bodies and Technologies

Introduction

2 Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment

Andrea A. Rusnock

3 Barometers of Change: Meteorological Instruments as Machines of Enlightenment

Jan Golinski

4 French Engineers Become Professionals; or, How Meritocracy Made Knowledge Objective

Ken Adler

5 Enlightened Automata

Simon Schaffer

Pt. 3 Humans and Natures

Introduction

6 Enlightened Monsters

Michael Hagner

7 The Science and Conversation of Human Nature

Marina Frasca-Spada

8 Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Gendering of Science in Eighteenth-Century France

Mary Terrall

9 The "Nature" of Enlightenment

E.C. Spary

Pt. 4 Provinces and Peripheries

Introduction

10 A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian Provinces

Paula Findlen

11 Going Dutch: Situating Science in the Dutch Enlightenment

Lissa Roberts

12 Daedalus Hyperboreus: Baltic Natural History and Mineralogy in the Enlightenment